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Printing

If you’re printing your design from a home printer or sending it to a print professional, you should download a PDF file with high-quality images. Canva exports PDF for print at 300 DPI. Here are the steps on how to download your design in PDF for print.

After you’re done designing, click the download button, and then choose PDF: for print from the selection.

Online printing tools

Designs you create in Canva can be printed using online printing tools such as Vistaprint.com, Moo.com, or Staples.com.

These online printing sites supports a variety of file formats for uploaded designs. However, for best quality print Canva recommends to download your design in PDF for print as this is the only file format that prints at 300 dpi.

Crop marks and bleed

When a design is sent to a professional printer, they use crop marks to know exactly where to trim the printed design. To ensure that a design has clean, solid color all the way to the edges, more color is printed beyond where the design will be cut. This extra color is called the bleed area. The bleed size in a Canva design is set at 5 millimeters (about 1/5 of an inch) beyond the edge of the design’s crop marks. To download your design with crop marks and bleed, go to Advanced download options.

Selecting the right paper

Dots per inch (DPI) refers to the number of dots per inch that an inkjet printer is capable of applying to a sheet of paper. It can range from 720 to 2800 and more. The closer these dots are to each other, the more they blend together forming continuous tones on the print.

Naturally, the quality of your design also depends on the paper that’s being printed on. If the paper is porous watercolor paper, the dots soak in and blend just fine at lower dpi settings like 720. On glossy photo papers, a higher setting—such as 1440—is needed because the ink dries on the surface.

Troubleshooting

Design is blurry when printing via online printing website

Canva download designs at a quality of 300 dpi. If your design appears blurry when uploaded to online printing websites, we recommend the following:

Download your design as PDF: for print.

Increase the dimensions of your design to make your design bigger and clearer for print.

Consult the online printing website you have used and report you have blurred issues in previous printing attempts. You may ask them if there's a specific issue with the file itself. (e.g. image used, resolution issues)